This c.b.c. 5 a m government obviously is on 5 Live at 5 o'clock the government has warned all u.k. Charities doing aid work overseas that funding will be withdrawn if they fail to cooperate with your Thora teaser safeguarding issues it comes after allegations against some Oxfam workers in Haiti were accused of using prostitutes in the aftermath of the 2010 Earth quite pretty battels the former Secretary of State for International Development this is now an opportunity for everyone to make sure that there are very clear not just God lies but you know action action will be taken the money will be withdrawn as well quite frankly if there is inappropriate behavior if Oxfam can have very serious questions about abuse and the inappropriate part of that to the teeth that obviously have been reported Oxfam says that shocked and dismayed by allegations in today's Observer newspaper that women believed to be prostitutes repeatedly invited to the charity's premises in chared Sam says if true the claims highlight unacceptable behavior by a small number of people tensions of increase between Israel and Syria with the Israelis launching a wave of attacks after one of their warplanes was apparently shot down rusher in the us have expressed concern about the situation is the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Iran 6 to use Syrian territory to attack Israel for its prefers goal of destroying as Iran brazenly violated its rules aren't they disparaged to be renamed wrong from Syrian territory into Israel and this demonstrates that our warnings were 100 percent correct his claim skin creams containing paraffin could be behind hundreds of fire deaths in Nikkei last year 5 Love investigators found the creams willing to dozens of victims their 5 chiefs say they could be many more Kiersten because Dutch dad died after he set him self alights while smoking. Cigarette was full of smoke and there was a pile of small drink cloves on the floor outside the bathroom still smoldering and burning a hole in the carpet and and other Some of us had covered in water Hassen. Looking so odd days and he said seem to have set myself on fire more on that story and 5 Live investigates from 11 this morning a new parliamentary report real the extent of the damage inflicted on children in England by parents who drink too much alcohol the findings include the number of deaths in cases of neglect and highlight a lack of specialist support our health correspondent Dina Campbell The report paints a bleak picture of the support available find more than half of kind souls in England have no strategy to help the children of alcoholics The government says work is under way on a new strategy says it's also bringing in higher g.t.s. To targets cheap alcohol and the Government's proposing energy companies should be allowed to see the personal data of some customers at risk of being in fuel poverty there is part of a consultation looking at how best to protect people who could be struggling to pay their bills that is the $5.00 Live news with the sport there is James let's returns a Pyong Chang for the Winter Olympics where Team g.b. Amy Fuller is in action in the women's slopestyle snowboarder he's this morning she's been delayed starting to inclement weather there Rob. Certainly as and it's been delayed a little longer now quarter past 2 local time which isn't about just under 50 minutes times the earliest possible start Amy Full Of course now alone in the slopestyle after that horrible injury to Katie on the eve of the games in training I can say that is the windiest and most bitterly cold wind chill day we've had so far so you can understand the decision that's been taken for the moment for the safety of the athletes stay warm Robin in the men's final 17 year old red Gerald took the gold medal will bring you all the medal moments from the Winter Olympics right here on 5 Live England run out 126 Biggs's over Wales in the 6 Nations at Twickenham England a 2 from say with a match to Ireland who beat Italy 5619 and also have had a perfect starts later today Scotland's men say conference at Murrayfield commentary on 5 Live from 3 o'clock this afternoon Manchester City extended their lead at the top of the Premier League to 16 points after a steamroller in Leicester 51 said Joe Guerra netted 4 times in that one song these one will win over Burley mean they're now 2 points clear of the drop zone West Ham habits and Tottenham all recorded wins too and in tennis you had a concert and Heather Watson both won as Britain be hungry to reach the Fed Cup will group to play off this is b.b.c. 5 live on digital on the smartphone and tablet on the weather Sunday stars icy across parts of the West and a cold blustery day the sunshine in snow showers will be most frequent in little from the West with some of the heavy police today of tonight and 7 from London. I said c.b.c. Radio 5. Because he. Introduces the 4 licenses she is slated this afternoon was. Mary's sounds in against Liverpool. Station and 5 extra. Thanks Sir Frank 1st with Chris' warbling to a McDonald's from 6 right now about his Chris Smith And then he could scientists in 5 signs it's a pretty record of programs at least call or text. Hello welcome to 5 Live Science I'm Chris Smith from The Naked scientists team and in this week's program the most powerful rocket ever built takes to the skies we wonder whether cockroaches could survive a nuclear war an evidence that vaporing could give you a chest infection Plus you get the same thing with plastics and so so what it really means is actually quite difficult to separate them out in order to recycle them in a way that for instance I mean you're more metal isn't quite as difficult plastic not so fantastic how science might nonetheless help us to solve the plastic problems that we've created for ourselves that make it scientists are 5 why. The emergence of Zico virus in Brazil in recent years has led to millions of people becoming infected the majority of them had no symptoms at all but some individuals were pregnant and the infection led to devastating damage to their babies' brains and it caused a condition called micro carefully but this only affected a very small number of infected infants most of them were born with normally proportioned heads so does this mean that they escaped being harmed a new paper published this week suggests not obstetrician Christina Adams ward off says that Zeek of ours infection can still do lasting damage to the nervous system without causing obvious micro carefully early 2016 I was reading a newspaper and it showed an infant with a very small head in Brazil and the question was on the front page could this be related to the seek a virus and I knew immediately that my life would change and we began to study intensively whether seek a virus could in fact be causing small heads in infants that were exposed to seek a virus in utero butt. How was it a virus actually infecting the fetus and what was the spectrum of injury and could we actually detect some of the early signs of this injury in the fetus for the study we actually used a non-human primate model a pigtail McCarrick which we could use to model as a virus infection in pregnancy by inoculating a virus under the skin of the mother and then we could follow what happened with ultrasound and then see what happened at the time of delivery in the fetal brain did the virus get into the fetuses in these monkeys. It did and we found that Sikh a virus did indeed cause significant damage to the fetal brain even when the head size was normal and the regions in the brain that were hardest hit areas that generated new brain cells one very important injured part of the fetal brain was something called the hippocampus and cells in this part are very important for memory and learning and they contribute to brain health through at least adolescence so loss of these brain cells is expected to cause problems with learning memory behavior and may not show until the child might be even one or 2 years old so are you saying then there might be a sort of clinical iceberg here where we know that there's the dramatic effect micro carefully a small head small brain we know that happens in you know what 5 percent of cases where there's been an infection but there may be this enormous burden of disease out there that we don't know about where there has been some subtle injury to the brain during development and that may not manifest until the individual starts to miss developmental milestones or starts to show deficits once they grow up a bit exactly we think that this is a kin to an iceberg type of phenomenon and what it also means is that our current clinical criteria that we use such as head size to diagnosis seek a virus related brain injury really failed to capture this more subtle but very significant brain damage does this mean then that we urgently need to be going in appraising cases where there was an overt obvious micro carefully but there was evidence of infection having occurred to follow up those kids and see if they do end up with some kind of deficit along the lines that you'll suggesting. Absolutely and not only do we need to follow children where we know that they had as a virus infection but also in cases where we weren't so sure and we need to look for neurocognitive delays in learning and neurological disorders that develop over time and so I think that a broader segment of the population that are exposed in that risk for a virus should ideally be screened in this way over a longer period of time so what should parents look out for that if you're someone who has been exposed because they didn't have the benefit of knowing what you're showing in this study beforehand the probably quite worried there are no cognitive specialists that have testing that can be performed in young children to assess for delays in learning changes in behavior and things that we can actually pick up in this way unfortunately these specials don't exist in large parts of the world where the virus is locally transmitted but to the best that we can we should try to make some of these tools available and I think that we need to also be sure to let pediatricians know that the infant's head size at birth should not be the main criteria for determining if a child had a brain injury related to seek a many children might not then benefit from these developmental and neural cognitive tests to identify deficits that was a Christina Adams would off from Washington University in Seattle and her paper describing measure cells has just come out in night show medicine now there was a very uplifting engineering achievement this week in Georgia males has more. T. Minus 30 seconds was Falcon Heavy the world's most powerful rocket launch this week from NASA as Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral Florida was for 3. Was space x. That by Ilan Musk live broadcast the event to millions both the launch of the rocket and then a life stream of the rather bizarre payload a bright red car with a national suited driver David Bowie Starman blaring from the speakers and the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy references all added into the mix. So what was the purpose of the stunt or dayshift showmanship or a scientific game changer Well it looks like it's a bit of both a couple of things make Falcon Heavy special Firstly it can carry about double the cargo of its nearest operational competitor that's 64 tons that can be blasted into space roughly equivalent to 10 elephants Luckily instead of elephants they used a Tesla car one of even masks other creations along with a dummy driver called Star man at the wheel. Am. I. Made chief this great left partly because Falcon Heavy is actually 3 Falcon 9 rocket stuck together they blasted off into low Earth orbit and then the upper capsule containing the payload detached and fired into space and here comes the unusual part the rockets can then be reused my space ships have rockets crush land which means each new launch has to practically be built from scratch but if folk in heavy can reuse the rockets this would cut the price significantly claims his method will reduce the cost of launch by $2.00 thirds. But it didn't go perfectly to plan 2 of the rockets did make it back with a beautifully controlled synchronized descent which wild people around the world 3 . Unfortunately day the middle row which was supposed to land on a separate platform in the sea overshot and smashed into the ocean and nearly 500 kilometers an hour. And Starman and is maybe looking fabulous but they overshot their target of Mars and are now on their way to the asteroid belt where it's quite possible they will be smashed to smithereens. Despite the setbacks people lauding the event as the start of the new space race it was a spectacle amends by future generations to go into science galvanized competition from businesses and further funding from governments and the new developments means we can send much bigger things into space such as satellites telescopes or robots on missions to Mars but one of space x. Is biggest ideas is the tourism industry in fact they want to take to tourists around the moon later this year so this could all lead to a brave new world or should that be worlds of space tourism and planetary exploration but there are concerns should the new space race really be in the hands of private companies and some have raised issues with the environmental cost of repeated launches the increased chance of space debris littering this planet and others and also contamination of microbes across our solar system which has implications in our hunt for life but either way they certainly know how to put on the shades. And. If you haven't seen the food from Star man's car in space on You Tube Do check it out that was George Mills reporting on the 4 can have a launch from space x. This week you're listening to 5 Live Science with me Chris Smith still to come why vi ping might be an infection risk and how we can solve the world's plastic problem . But before that is time for this week's myth conception and Lewis Thompson has been working out who or perhaps even what might survive a nuclear war cockroaches these creepy crawlies fire incredibly hard to creatures able to survive what would kill most of us you can squeeze a cockroach to a quarter of its normal height and it will crawl away unharmed it's even said that if there was a nuclear war cockroaches would be the only thing left to life but is that actually true well well cockroaches are able to tolerate high temperatures nothing on earth could survive the heat produced by a nuclear bomb exploding. The temperature within a 10 metre radius of the explosion becomes hotter than the surface of the sun. If the cockroaches were far enough away they could survive the initial blast but what about the nuclear fallout when a nuclear bomb explodes it releases ainus ing radiation and this kind of radiation contains enough energy to break apart chemical bonds including those holding our d.n.a. Together this means our cells stop working properly and can die causing vomiting haemorrhages seizures and in many cases death so are cockroaches somehow immune to these problems well it's true the cockroaches are able to tolerate much higher levels of radiation than we can in a rather unpleasant experiment the animals are subjected to high radiation levels for a month of radiation is measured in a unit called Green 10 Grey would kill a human in a few days and some of the cockroaches survive a months exposure to $100.00 degree so why are cockroaches better than humans when it comes to surviving radiation well d.n.a. Is most vulnerable to radiation damage when it's dividing this happens any time your body is making new cells which in us is happening all the time. But cockroaches like most insects produce new cells at a much slower rate and so the proportion of cells in their body that will be vulnerable to radiation damage is much lower than in humans but would this be enough to save them from nuclear war the nuclear bomb which was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 is estimated to have a method to between $4.12 Gray of radiation in a one kilometer radius So cockroaches would have been Ok but today's nuclear weapons are estimated to be several 1000 times more deadly so a global nuclear war today would almost certainly way cockroaches However there are some organisms on Earth that might survive thermal caucus gamma tolerance is a species of archaea a group similar to bacteria which lives in boiling hot hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor it can tolerate 30000 grey that's over 3000 times what humans can cope with and one species of fungus has been found growing inside the melted reactor of the tree noble nuclear power plant finding a way to convert the radiation into energy for itself so well cockroaches have a better chance than us at surviving nuclear war they probably wouldn't the only things we're pretty sure would survive are a few species of our killer bacteria and fungus so let's hope humanity has the sense to not hit that big red button Well thank you Lois for that cheery thought Meanwhile if you have some suspicious sounding science that you'd like us to scrutinize do send an e-mail to 5 Live Science or b.b.c. Doco dot u.k. And we'll take a look. Public Health England suggest it should be available on prescription some people are taking it up as a means of recreation others are using it to help them quit smoking in all cases there's a very strong belief that vaporing is a healthier alternative to cigarettes but a study out this week suggests that the inhaled vapor from the cigarettes can make the cells that line our airways much stickier and therefore increase the odds that bacteria like the pneumococcal us that can cause chest and other infections can gain a toehold Jonathan Greig is a respected tree consultant at Queen Mary University of London baking is increasingly popular as a smoking cessation aid and youngsters are taking up vaporing itself so it's important that we understand the facts on the on the lung and what we're looking at is the risk of developing serious infection that's with a bug called the pneumococcus and that causes pneumonia and we know that if you cigarette smoke you're at significantly increased risk of pneumonia and the mechanism is that bugs just stick more to the airways and they can get a little Nisha and they can get a foothold in the airway and cause infection so what we did was put a point to airway cells human airway cells we sort of expected not to see very much but in fact the cigarette paper significantly increased the stickiness of the bugs to the cells in the same way as cigarette smoke and you know how it makes them sticky The mechanism is really interesting what the bug does is it hijacks a normal substance that's expressed on the cells as a receptor it uses it as a Trojan horse it sort of sticks to that receptor and then as the receptor normally gets into the cell the bug just moves across into the cell so it's a real sort of high it's like a hijack literally and so what we saw was that a ping increased the amount of receptor on the cell and more bugs stuck to that receptor. That's in cells in a dish but how confident are you that that represents what's going on in one of your patients yes to address that what we took was a group of vapors we took a little scrapes of the cells from their nose before they faked doing their normal vaporing session and one hour after that and we look for the expression of this receptor that the box can hijack and we 4 found that the receptor was significantly increased at least 2 or 3 fold increase after baiting and does that end up reflecting an increased risk of infection obviously you can't do that in human patients it would be unethical because at the moment all you can say is that it appears the cells get stickier it appears that this is secondary to the vague thing but can you put the whole puzzle together and say a ping causes more infections you're quite right we haven't translated that into risk I mean it really needs large scale what we call epidemiological surveys to be able to do that it's same way as smoking but what we did do is in an animal model we put exposed animals to date and infected them with the pneumococcus and we found increased amount of pneumococcus in the nose of bape exposed animals so at least in that situation we saw an effect. What about you know I've classically heard it said if you go and wander around in London you might as well have smoked tobacco cigarettes if you walk down some streets because the traffic pollution is so significant How do you quantify it qualify and standardize what you call by paying and the infection risk arising from it and compare it to say just occupational exposure or or day to day exposure to pollution I think that's a very very important point and we've looked at various 6 other exposures enamelled all which are known to be increased risk of pneumococcal infection and you actually say diesel exhaust particles increase the risk especially in young children of pneumonia but you're in ammonia welding it's not your patient exposure that increases that in our model we see those those effects so I think yes just walking around a polluted environment is increasing your risk as we know but that doesn't cause mean that they ping can be dismissed this will be an additional risk to what is an unacceptable level of pollution we have in our cities to think it makes a difference what the composition of the vite fluid is because they come in lots of different flavors don't they potentially does and what we can do now with our model is to play around if you like with the composition we can make our own bait we can look at effect of just a major component which is propylene glycol which is like a food additive on its own we can add in the flavorings and that's to say the many hundreds of thousands of flavorings so we can start doing this sort of these experiments to to scale and really now down what are the components which are causing it as yet we think nicotine isn't the major player out there it has some effect but what it is in that they could seem for a very it's unclear that was Jonathan Gregg and his study was published in the European respected regional. Will we ever find life outside our solar system if we're going to a good prospect would be an Earth like planet last year astronomers came across a planetary system that was called Trappist one which is in the constellation Aquarius it's 40 light years away which is about 370 trillion kilometers so it's not really nearby but what's got them excited is that the star at the center of the system which is only about 10 percent of the size of our sun has a clutch of 7 planets in orbit around it and these planets are very similar to Earth in terms of their mass their composition and their size and over the last year astronomers have been scrutinizing them in detail you see Clark heard how from physicist a Maori trilled from the University of Birmingham. And seventy's were pretty large what we did not know then was exactly what mess so exactly what radius the planets were we had an idea which allowed us to cordon both right but those properties are some of the most fundamental properties of a planet and the mass and the radius combine tell us about the density and the density of a planet that is us about what it's made of so for instance a planet like the us has a certain density and it's telling us that it has at the center something made of iron and nickel and on top is a big layer of rocks so by comparing our planets to the earth we can't deduce what's inside of them how they were built how different or similar they are to what we know but one thing was certain the track this one system was right allowing scientists to study its planetary atmosphere that before they could start exploring it was important to turn their attention to the star at the center of the system what we measure always in relation to the style the always measure the mass of a planet compared to the mass of the star the radius of a planet compared to the radius of the star so forget the stars. Wrong we get the planet wrong so we started by the most obvious what is the star and then we observed more as the planet passed in front of the stall casting a shadow and from how deep the shadow was we could measure more and more precisely how big the planets were and then we tried to measure the mass and we did that by measuring how early or late they came in front of the Star which was a reflection of the forces that are acting between the planets themselves and finally we did a reckon instance observation trying to find out if any of the planets had an atmosphere made of hydrogen and helium something that would be similar to Rangers in that June mind you and I we did not know whether those planets were really Earth like or Mordecai June but now we can say with a fair amount of certainty that the most be rocky. And high comet is also a rocky planets so I'm at Curie Venus and Mars but how similar is this system compared to Bahrain they're remarkably similar when we had large uncertainties it meant that difference could have any mass a radius within those uncertainties and they could have fallen anywhere but we find out that Trappist one see is almost a copy of Venus we find a Trappist one d. Looks really much like the moon and Trappist one is by far the most interesting is the most from that planet we've identified so far with it and you know composition that seems to match a planet. So things are looking up with this force planet its density is almost the same as meaning that they are in the course must be similar but what about those all important signs of water 20 at the moment do not know and I could be the amount of water that is on earth is minute 0.02 percent of the mass of the earth is made of water so with this little amount it's hard to measure. It On Trappist 20 However we do know that there is a lot of water around Trump just one being the planet closest to the star seems to have a vast amount of volatile areas so volatile is something that is not solid if it is water then it would have 250 times more than the Earth has so having a lot of water in the system bodes well for water on top is 20 and given 10 years Amery suspects that will even know what Trappist one. Will be like say could we he meant ever set for that with imagination or may I think there really close astronomy speaking sadly astronomical distances astronomy calling nature of the enormous extremely vast system is 40 light years away and that may sound far to travel but it's among the 300 closest stars to the sun. So it's gross on astronomy what terms but despite its proximity I doubt that humanity will look at these anytime soon although I do hope that our discoveries inspire the next generation of physicists to find a way to bring us there let's hope so that was a Maori trailed from the University of Birmingham he worked on the 4 papers describing those findings which are published this week in Nature. Now it's time for the news and sports but do stay with us though because we'll be back right afterwards to tell you how we can solve the problems being caused by plastics from digital online smartphone and tablet this is b.b.c. 5 Live I'm government or on the b.b.c. News on 5 Live at 529 firms facing further allegations that staff use prostitutes during overseas aid missions the new accusations focus on charity in 2006 and follows similar claims involving its staff in Haiti 7 years ago the charity says it shocked and dismayed the UN's call for an immediate deescalation in Syria after Israel attacked a rainin bases there it was in response to the downing of an Israeli warplane and 5 Live investigations or claims hundreds of deaths in fires may be linked to the use of skin creams containing paraffin most of the creams don't carry a warning the medicines regulators conducting a safety review into the use Nigeria's president says Boko Haram militants have released 13 people who were kidnapped in July it follows negotiations involving the Red Cross and the government says energy companies should be allowed to see the personal data of some customers at risk of being in fuel poverty or consultations looking at how best to protect people who might be struggling to pay their bills that is a $5.00 Live news with the sport now is James let's head straight back to the Winter Olympics where Amy follow have to wait in the heat Rob hatch. She will it's been cancelled 8 century and she'll be in the final 8 to run final tomorrow after ghosts of strong and bitterly cold winds got in the way and it was deemed unsafe battling the winds a little later on at 6 15 am United Kingdom time Andrew Musgrave and Callum Smith will go for Britain in the men's 15 and 15 kilometer ski Athlone that's a cross-country event a must start a switch from classic to free technique halfway through the race that's coming up in the next hour Thanks Rob England maintained their perfect start to the 6 Nations as they beat Wales 126 at Twickenham Jonny may impress with 2 tries and he was delighted with his personal performance the focus throughout about for a day was the aerial but on the defense and I think we did well on the market chases brought in and our defense work was good so we appraise it on a wet day in and then to get a couple of choices or is always brilliant feeling personally and that's my job to do for the team if I'm present at the chance Island also made it 2 wins from Italy 5619 in Dublin you can if Scotland take on France from Murrayfield on 5 Live from 3 o'clock this afternoon Man City a move 16 points clear of the top of the Premier League they thrash less that 51 and manager Pep Guardiola is keeping his feet on the ground so it was important to maintain momentum after dropping pretty points away at Burnley last week for the Prius every day isn't thing too much how many games left to win the Premier League so focus on on the next one so every time we do a point this isn't going to ever turn against Chris for Again early against Liverpool always in the f one and that is social important we didn't make a result in a row Swansea unbeaten in 9 they beat Burnley one nil Meanwhile Stoke boss Paul Lambert insisted he would not blame his players for scrambling over a light penalty which they missed in their one all draw with Brighton has a read regret the Rodrigo's was fouled on the spot kick but complained when Charlie Adam pick the picks up the ball to take a. Why not check out. The lies. And fail it's. Great and the story plus the train is we have some tips to share. I always listen to the podcast when I do my cardio workout is so inspiring and motivating trying to fit in. A major players to make one every week the time tally I'm sad I'm dating and we often go games I think is such a profound subject I'm so glad we're talking about it. And Subscribe now 1st for news and the best large scale this is b.b.c. 5 Live. On 5 Live from 6 o'clock is breakfast with Chris Warburton and Claire McDonald But let's get part 2 of 5 Live Science Welcome back to 5 Live saw and sign Chris Smith from The Naked Scientist team and for the next half an hour or so George Mills and I are looking at a fantastic but also also fantastic man made substance. It's inescapable it's in places you'd expect like in packaging but also in our clothes many of our cosmetics and even our tennis balls there are plastic bags lying in the bottom of the ocean and we've even gone and left a load in space so when did we turn into a world of plastic. The 1st manmade plastic which is pack a scene was created in Birmingham in $850.00. Since then scientists have unlocked the alchemy of even more polyethylene. And it's taken the world by storm is the past. Easy to handle 2 liter plastic bottle it's quite clear plastic that lets you play everything. Cling film bottles bags even your moon the latest thing in garden technology may be the answer to your problem it's the stuff. Plastic. It's everywhere and for good reason it's cheaper than glass to make it less likely to shatter it can block out bacteria keeping food fresh which avoids food waste and it's lighter than other storage materials which reduces transport costs and of course the carbon emissions but the columns that come with these parties are building up alongside the mountains of plastic. We know it doesn't degrade we know it's filling up our oceans killing turtles whales and albatrosses alike we know it gets ripped down into tiny pieces that into our food but still we're producing about 300000000 tons every year but could things be about to turn around to resume a pledges to eradicate all avoidable plastic waste by $24.00 mastic free aisles at supermarkets are among the ideas being put forward by Tourism a plastic problem the u.k. Under pressure to find new ways to recycle 2 things have happened recently which might spell a change since its invention some 100 years ago passage has become an integral part of our daily lives blue planet to add highlighting the dramatic impact tomorrow sions in the animals that live China no longer wants to be the world's rubbish going to ban the import of 24 columns of white china has been accepting a lot of plastic waste from the West have said no more and so people and the government are you know than ever the plastic free alternatives that can we give our poll of affair with plastic and can science help and. Later we'll hear about the company thinks they can use waste plastic to build better roads and the scientists making plastics from who but before that let's get up close with the chemistry of the stuff Cambridge University chemist Steven Lee joins us Hi Stephen you know let's start with the basics on what is a plastic so a plastic when chemists think of plastics what we're thinking about is repeat monomer units of the word polymer you may have heard is that's how chemistry we think about plastics and that's a essentially a big long chain molecule that consists of much smaller molecules that link together. Typically Vire carbon carbon link so one of the is a like a little unit to little pod and then a polymer is a letter they strung together exactly said poly meaning many and murmuring unit comes from the Greek polymer it all makes sense so how do you make a plastic there's lots of ways to make plastic and they have very large meanings but I think in the general terms when people think about plastic spade or some wrapper the way you do that if you take a typically a small molecule that has a carbon carbon double bond in and you apply it by various of heat or chemical reactions you can encourage that form long long chains and that typically can be done by our small molecules that come from the petrochemical industry for instance and so why does it stick around for so long well the reason is there's not the Jewish know methods for things that are great so we think about some things rusting or trees or organic waste being digested there are kind of biological organisms that have very specific spent billions of years evolving lots of complex pathways to be able to break those bones in the case of say cellulose that's a polysaccharides that's a polymer as well but it's made of lots of sugar molecules but in the case of a polymer like you're the plastic bag a shopping center that's typically made a polyp thing or polyethylene and so that's a very different kind of chemistry one's got to break a carbon carbon bond and that's much harder for the natural world to break down and so unfortunately we just haven't had the bacteria in another environment haven't had time to can deal with that right so something like cellulose which is actually kind of similar to a plastic can be broken down just because it's been around for millions of years but in plants that's true it's called biopolymers So there's this 3 kinds of kind of bio problems but what we're talking about here is this unusual class which we see every day but on the timescale of evolution is a is a relative newcomer and we've only had the 1st completely synthetic plastic since 1007 and why can't we just recycle it why can't we put it like in the opposite way through the plastic machine Yeah that's a thermodynamic onsets of that so it's to do all the technology to understand why plastics don't mix is the same chemistry. In the same physics that we worked on the industrial revolution in fact what it is to do with is if you take 2 compounds and try and mix them together they sometimes they they mix some things they don't polymers don't like to do that because they do they don't gain as much entropy as at this time about how disordered something is so what it really means is because polymers don't mix if I just take a mixture of my compounds and try to heat them up to kind of regenerate a big slushy plastic I means that they will face separate so they are much more oil and water don't mix you get the same thing with plastics and so so what that really means is actually quite difficult to separate them out in order to recycle them in a way that for instance aluminum metal isn't quite as difficult and I guess quite often within the same product you have a few different types of plastic absolutely on Play Yes Anyway very careful on the bottom of your plastic bag or on the bottom of your bottle of Diet Coke you'll see that there's a little mark on the terms the type of plastic and what I mean is that you have polyethylene a policy that's possibly a cycle with other clumps of poly polyphème but it's not if you use poly me from that really a polystyrene or any other synthetic polymer we traditionally today could we use nature to help us then is there anything out there that might be able to munch away at these carbon bones there's person in the literature for various bacteria and also fungus to degrade very specific types of plastic Now we in biology there's lots of ways in which we can digest plastic but the chemistry to be able to digest these specific compounds is just unusual and therefore doesn't exist a lot I'm fortunate That's the absolutely could be but we haven't really found anything yet there have been some studies where people actually the way they look for them is they look on in and around plastic plants because they think if bacteria could start eating plastic it would be a limitless source of food is an all we can eat buffet of energy to a bacterium So there is a clear kind of push for them to be able to use it unfortunately normally what happens is we have to find ones I have a because all of the chemistry I was talking about is very specific it means that bacteria have to revolve different ways to be able to digest specific plastic so you don't get one bacteria will eat all plastics but there are examples of bacteria . Eat It's very specific kind but not just not very well at the moment right very briefly do you think we could modify something in a lab or super bacteria to just go into the oceans and destroy all the plastic and solve all of our problems catch a spider to kill a fly so it's possible and I think those people are working on really interesting ways to be able to modify bacteria we have lots and lots of genetic tools in the war tree to be able to change bacteria to do our bidding as it were the trouble is the specificity to be able to break this carbon carbon bond in my plastic bag and not break the bond in me is very different and that's the challenge going forward I suppose you don't want that so thanks very much Steven Lee from the University of Cambridge Thanks though people for wouldn't it end up with bacteria that like to break down yourself so it doesn't look like degrading plastic naturally is currently an option that's on the table what Therefore can we do with the piles of plastic that already exist in nature perhaps we could use it to solve another problem that we have and that's what Toby McCartney is aiming to do with his company creeper So Toby what's your solution we take waste plastics and I think it's important to say waste plastics are these aren't recyclable plastics these are plastics that are destined for landfill we take those and we mix them in with an ash mix or road mix to replace part of the bit chairman which is another form of carbons to make a longer lasting sometimes stronger sometimes more elastic road structure that doesn't hold as readily can you use any kind of plastic for this so it wouldn't matter if you had a mixture because of what Stephen was saying there we can't just take any old plastic and shove it in there it has to we call it homogenized it has to mix in well with the remaining of the bitch and that's in the mix so that it works together to do different things to various different roads we basically make cakes of various different waste plastics told me through the process then so you take some plastic How much do you need what do you do with it to make it. Ready and then how is it deployed into the field or road even. We we take those plastic some of it comes from commercial plastic waste plastic some of it comes from our councils our household waste. I mean most people see a plastic bottle say as just a plastic bottle but actually there's 4 different types of polymers for different plastics within one bottle you have the bottle that's made from a particular type of plastic and then the lid that goes on that's another type of plastic and then the wrap that's another type of plastic so what we do is we separate them all out and then as a say like a cake mix really in fact we have 3 different cake mixes where we put those polymers back together so they work in to replace parts of the bits from and that's the oil base the black stuff that you'll see in a road those pellets that we produce the cake that we produce that's added in at the same time that the the ash belt is manufactured so the bitch moan is taken out and our pellets our plastic pellets are then added in is it a bit like bio diesel where you end up with a certain amount is the green version and then there's some original from oil out of the ground diesel and you get a sort of mixture when you do this you get some bitumen with some of your new plastic Yes So what sort of ratio is well it just depends on the road type so again most people look at a road and just see a road but there's various different road forms some house more bitch moan but we replace anywhere between 5 to 20 percent of the bitch and content that goes into a road a road mainly made up of stone so aggregates maybe 90 percent is aggregates and then the sand and stuff that goes in there but up to 10 percent of the contents of a road is the bitch a minute self how does it perform in practice it's absolutely fantastic we had trials down now all over the u.k. We're just about to launch in places like. Over in Bahrain we've got roads down in the g.c.c. Countries for testing we have to meter British and European standards and we overly meet that so it performs much better than a standard ash felt in what way in terms of where ability to your ability in terms of safety talk me through what the different parameters are that you assess it by Yair So we have 3 different products if you like or 3 different cakes one of them gives a higher tensile strength so it makes the road basically stronger so if you've got heavy goods vehicles lots of traffic on a road it's very good to create a stronger road another product add some flexibility into the road so up in say Scotland or over in Canada where we have lots of freezing conditions what happens is as we get a lot of rain the rain gets kind of soaked up into the ash belt and is stored in tiny little air pockets within the ash felt as that water freezes and we know the science behind this that water then expands and often will see on our roads lots of cracks and therefore potholes one of our products gives an elastic quality if you like to the ash felt so it reduces those cracks and therefore reduces those potholes What about the environmental impact because one of the reasons people are so concerned about plastics is that where particles ground up plastic ends up in the ocean it then becomes fodder for filter feeders and it can concentrate other pollutants and things up the food chain as well as being directly toxic for marine animals and it's not good on land either is there not a danger that if you put lots of plastic on the roads that it's going to wear down as vehicles go over the road surface and therefore it'll turn into plastic particles that Washington drains and end up in the sea anyway we're back to square one you know I think there's 2 points here that the 1st is you have to remember where a plastic so coming from so they are they are from landfill or destined for landfill . And what happens. And that goes to landfill a lot of it is you know blown out into our rivers and then off into our oceans as whole plastics now we're taking those those plastics and we can only take the ones that purely they are modernize into the bitch man so they become part of the bit human that's in the road so there's no microbe e.g. May have heard of micro beads there's no plastics present in the road it becomes part of the bit human a little bit like So if the road currently if the human is the binder so that's the sticky stuff that sticks a stone together that's a little bit like at the moment we have stick in our roads and what we've produced or what we produce with our actual manufacturers is the super glue so if anything it stops the leeching of that bitch human going off into our rivers Let's hope it does Toby thank you to McCartney from we wish you luck with the trials and hopefully you'll come back and tell us how you got home in due course. One of the problems with plastic as we've heard is that it just won't break down bio plastics though might be one solution you could make something that is designed to break down and one team is aiming to cut waste and do this is by making by plastics from some other form of waste and that's the waste itself Georgia spoke today I'm in there to use that metal University in Perth Western Australia we want to tell people that we're making plastics from but in reality what we're trying to do is utilize resources that are in waste streams and turn them into something profitable rather than basically just create them and send them out on to all stream try and make a product go what kind of product can you make from sewage so to be frank we don't quite used to sue each we use the bacterial cultures that are in the sewage and they can actually produce bioplastics and that's by degradable and we can use it for packaging and lots of other types of things and replace oil waste plastics would this look like an ordinary plastic what but it's no you know they just look like an ordinary plastic so this slightly differently don't smell the coaches themselves don't even smell which is great because it makes lead much more interesting but yeah basically we're hoping that we can reproduce the sign characteristics of an oil plastics hopefully use I guess a biological process to get it done so whilst the biological process is cleaning the water we're getting a particle signed on how does this technology My name's Leon Houston an electric chemistry athletic University in Perth Western Australia basically it's the equivalent of a stadium too much food and getting fat so the bacteria put on the conditions where they are given far too much food but not enough of oxygen source such as oxygen or money or something like that so they get too much of chips and not enough fruit and veggies and exercise and under those conditions they effectively store all the rich cap and source that they get given so that they can hide it from all the bacteria it's an evolutionary thing that if and teaches them the bacteria and then under conditions where they suddenly have no external source of cabin. But a rich source of oxygen or ammonia that they can then use that to continue growing when no one else can I imagining bacteria equivalent of perhaps to stuffing seeds in its cheeks pretty much and it actually forms vacuum in the cells that are you can visualize as big lumps of plastic basically what do you have to put into the bacteria to get this plastic out many many many bacteria showing to do this obviously some are better than others you basically just need to give them something like glucose or vinegar something reaching carbon and let them do it just try not to give them too much oxygen or too much not huge and at the same time and they pretty much go for themselves and then they create these bags of plastic in their cells how do you think get this out of them well at the moment this is the environmentally friendly bit potentially this is the bit where we have to use cell phones and things to actually kill the bacteria and extract out the plastic so that part of it at the moment is not looking particularly nice However there are some people doing some research in similar areas with things like alky that can extrude things like buy or elles or potentially even the plastics so there are other ways to look at you know how is this plastic different from ordinary plastic it's not it's what's classed as the thermoplastic it still has the same cond of properties that plastics that you see in Champaign bottles and things hep it does need postprocessing so it doesn't have the cross-linking things the more complicated 3rd degree structure that plastics have that get used commercially but those are things that you can add in a chemical sense after they've been extracted from the bacteria we might be able to design the feed that we give the bacteria better to actually enhance the production of Coppola MOUs poem is made up of more than one more moment in one building block and if we do that the plastics will come out closer to commercial plastics at that point already how easy will this be to scale up how are you going to get a usable amount of plastic from this process yet it's not it's not trivial so we would have to do things like high density cell cultures. And they're quite hard to manage so you would need to have membrane technologies and things like that to have maximum eczema maximum number of bacteria and small footprints of space so that you've got minimal amount of water maximum amount of bacteria and therefore extraction of the bacteria so these and this is not trivial questions but if we can get the technology working at the lead scale then that's kind of where we would link up with an engineer who would solve hopefully those problems for us and then at the end of this process you hopefully have a plastic that is wired to grade Why is it biodegradable just she leapt because the night of why the bacteria make it they make it so they have a carbon source light and when they when they have abundance of oxygen but they don't have any carbon external to the so it has to be degradable by them otherwise they wouldn't have made it for the advantage of getting the fat in their cells and stealing it from other bacteria sorry that automatically means it's biodegradable best case scenario what are you hoping that this can do so the big picture is that we could basically harmfully like a one of these plants next to an industrial sort type and why is water clean up the not huge and in particular it comes out of it that the banks here it can use and then also produce basically a product and we can hopefully create a product that we can change that product that will run for different uses one of the really big ideas we like is not just to tell you. Wastrel traditional way streams like they come from like you would expect in a. Wastewater treatment plant but industrial waste streams as well so there are lots of industries are wineries for example breweries that use bacterial cultures to clean their water before they release it but that contains a lot of carbon a lot of carbon we hope that what we can do is actually create carbon create these polymers from that waste carbon in a sense and then actually be able to produce you know maybe the packaging for the be a long way since easing product that would have been created anyway by this other process and otherwise going to waste Yeah yeah and so that whole process then becomes very micro biological because you use used to make the beer in the 1st place bacteria used to clean the water and then produce the packaging potentially for the promote amazing I could drink to that that was a Damien led and before him Larry Hughes from met at university in Western Australia so Steven why aren't by plastics bigger they sound like a great solution to the whole problem that there are great solution unfortunately the feedstock from where we get that monument you know fundamental unit from which we built these polymers cars to come from somewhere and so traditionally we use that comes from the petro chemical industries things like ethylene and and other compounds that have this the bonded one can use by put plastics perfectly well good example poly lactic acid if anyone's ever had a dissolvable stitch it's often gone to any that's an example of bypass that which is just dissolved period of months but the feedstock for that is made from sugar so that's just more expensive than is just he's the off shoots from the petro comes industry done the use starch in some plastic bags these days to even begin to make them fall apart Yes So this is interesting the plastics and she spent the 1st 50 years trying to make their plastics last longer and have better mechanical properties and they've been spending the last 20 years trying to make them fall apart faster. And so I guess throughout the show we've we found a lot of things people are working on but there doesn't seem to be any kind of so. A billet on the horizon here so I suppose what I've learned is that I just need to to reduce the amount plastic I use and Chris you and me should hang our heads in shame because we know for in plastic we were discussing this before the program because Stephen we offered him some cake you didn't want to know but I brought in cake of the week covered in cling film Georgia turned up with brownies both foodstuffs are delicious but unfortunately they are covered with environmentally extremely unfriendly and not on program message coatings and packaging. Would not acknowledge good it's a classic case of do what I say not what I do Stephen I'm curious do you have any top tips on reducing our own plastic consumption it's not what one would consider traditional one way you could reduce your past use actually is to kind of think about trying to use alternative forms of transport things like electric cars so the majority when we take crude oil out of the ground the majority of that oil is used to make petrol but all the rest office left over is the feedstock for plastic so we can reduce our need demand for the petrochemical industry we decreasing our need to be able to use this by product to turn into plastic that's a really interesting point I hadn't really thought of that the fact that plastic is being used from a by product so why not turn it into something absolutely the other point because someone said to me the other day Stephen I don't know what your take is on this that we should just package all these things we see in the supermarkets in paper for example but then I pointed out and maybe you can tell me if I'm right that well actually you got to factor in that if I packaged the food stuff in plastic it last longer it has a longer shelf life therefore we're probably going to throw away less food and we know that rearing meat is incredibly bad for the environment in terms of carbon emissions transport Haitian of the meat disposal safely of waste food and so on so that it's not just a simple as what we used to package stuff up is it absolutely So we really want to think about is the tell energy content and so that includes everything as you say people use their carbon footprints a similar kind of quantity is how much energy is required to make not just your apple but your apple packaging and put it in a truck and move it from the other side of the world. That's the thing you want to minimize and so there's obviously these a lot of interest into being able to use local food which is actually what you're doing there is reducing your energy footprint and that's ultimately the goal of these things is to reduce the amount of energy required to produce these packaging materials can we just bring in Toby at this point Toby from McCree But is this this sort of analysis the kind of thing that you did when you were considering the impact and doing the impact assessment for your road surfacing project Yeah I mean we look at our business from a carbon emissions standpoint Unfortunately the construction industry has pretty bad for releasing carbon emissions and everything that it does not a cent of the world c o 2 is is from Concrete isn't it. So we're looking to reduce those by using less Bitterman we've worked out that we we save a ton of carbon emissions for every tonne of bitch or man that we replace which is quite have to really Stephen do you have any points on business Yeah I mean I think the interesting point here is that I don't think anyone is trying to reduce plastic use completely and I think that's an important there's always going to be a need to be able to use it as a wonder material that we have and to decide to think that it's all bad under all conditions is wrong I think what you want to do is think about a way to stimulate the economics of such such that if we do really need disposable plastics that we make biodegradable plastics more economically viable and in which case all of the problems are go away because people instantly switch to these these more nubile sources Toby without Spode trouble for you if you used up all the plastic in the landfill Unfortunately for the rest of the world if we stop producing plastic today McCready we would still have enough to lay every road every new road around the world just with the waste that we produce at the moment so stopping it isn't going to stop our business so we would love it to be stopped because we're on a mission to stop the plastic epidemic as we call it but it won't have any impact on our on. Business Well it's incredible the amount we've made Thank you so much that's Toby McCartney from the Creba and thanks to all our other guests this week that Steven Lee Damien lead and Leon he's Thank you Georgia and 5 Live Science is back next week when we're going to be rummaging through our postbag and answering the science questions that you've been sending in speaking of which if you'd like to get in touch in the meantime e-mail address 5 life science happy b.c. Dot co dot u.k. Until next time for me Chris Smith. Your call my. 95.6 radio for the West. And to a very good morning to you on this Sunday morning sure Kohlmann here in the studios in the mailbox but I know it's him talking to people right across the the planet which is quite scary really because with listening again and with the Internet this program is broadcast pretty much anywhere you can get you can get in .